Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within 30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.
He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.
Mr. Waugh boasted that he could have killed Carlos as well. Mr. Black, who was the C.I.A. station chief in Khartoum, didn’t think he was serious.
“Billy was larger than life,” Mr. Black said in the phone interview. “I remember him stating that. ‘Yes, fine, Billy, that’s not your job.’ Sometimes he went off the reservation. He could be a force multiplier, but he could also be a force pain in the ass.”
After 9/11, Mr. Waugh, who was then 71, lobbied to be sent to Afghanistan.
“Billy got a folding chair and set it up opposite the entrance to my office and told my office manager, ‘I’m going to sit here until Cofer talks to me,’” said Mr. Black, who was director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center at the time.
Eventually, they talked. Mr. Waugh was still quite fit, and the next day, Mr. Black agreed to send him to Afghanistan, reasoning that his experience in unconventional warfare might help a young commander there.
During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.
